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‘E’. Wayne, considerably more drunk than Jadie, had
seemed to think this was a great idea, judging from the excited,
semi-articulate noises he had made in response. Sam, smiling
politely, had thanked Jadie for his time and, keeping a firm grip
on Wayne’s jacket, had dragged him through the now-crowded pub to
the street.
    In the warm, still, evening air,
Sam tried to take stock of what she'd achieved. Unfortunately,
Wayne was mumbling his way through some long, rambling story about
gangsters or something. With the deep self-absorption of the
seriously drunk, he absolutely insisted that she pay attention to
him but, what with his mumbling and her own self-absorption, Sam
regarded his incoherent saga as nothing more than an irritating
distraction. Anyway, this was no time to be listening to drunks
retelling the plot of some awful B movie. So she hailed a taxi,
stuck Wayne in the back and sent him home. He'd done his bit. Now
it was all up to her.
    It bothered Sam that Jadie had
turned out to be such a drongo but he was going to take her to the
cult's base and that's all that mattered in the end. As she walked
back to the car park, she began composing opening paragraphs in her
head. Maybe there was enough material here for a three-part
feature? Maybe even a book? She stopped walking and took a deep,
steadying breath. No sense getting too excited. Just stay cool
until she met the 'guru guy'. Then she'd know what she had. Until
then she would just need to keep her excitement under control and
her head clear for the important interview that was coming up.
    Unfortunately for Sam, she was too
wrapped in thought to notice a beat up old ute pull up at the back
of Steiner's department store two blocks away. Nor did she see the
fourteen, identical, naked women climb out – mostly from under a
tarpaulin at the back – and head into the shadow of the
building.
     
     

Chapter 6: Steiner’s
     
    Drukk was in shock. The drive
through the city streets had been a nightmare. The stolen ute, its
engine screaming in first gear, had swerved and dodged among the
other vehicles as Braxx shouted directions, probably at random.
They had come so close to hitting buildings, metal poles, other
vehicles—some of them gigantic—and startled humans, who gawped at
him and Braxx with bulging eyes and open mouths even as he veered
around them, that Drukk could not believe they had survived the
ordeal, let alone arrived at their intended destination. Could
Braxx really have known what he was doing? Or had the Great Spirit
guided him, as he claimed? Either way, the important thing was that
he was no longer in that metal death-machine and that he would
never, never try to drive one again.
    The images of impending destruction
kept running through his mind as his glazed eyes watched his fellow
survivors scrambling through the freshly-blasted hole into the dark
building. He saw their backs, hideously smooth and pallid, their
lower limbs, jerky and stiff, with round wobbling masses of flesh
above them. It was all so endlessly awful, he was not sure that he
could go on. He shuddered, closing his eyes against the nightmare
of his continuing existence.
    “Drukk!”
    It was Braxx, hissing at him from
the dark hole.
    “Drukk! What’s the matter with you?
Get in here at once! Do you want something to see you?”
    With a mighty sigh, Drukk clenched
his teeth (horrible, horrible feeling), squared the bony
protrusions below his neck, thrust out the wobbling mounds of flesh
in front of him and held his head up high. Bravely, he forced his
shaky, lower limbs to move and followed the others into the
building.
    Inside, the 'department store'
stretched away in all directions, a single huge slab of space. The
low ceiling suggested other, similar slabs above them. The
strangeness of the scene, patchily lit by the Vinggans' personal
photon projectors, was overwhelming. A sudden bright flash was
followed by a crash as someone blasted a mannequin to pieces.
"Oops. Sorry,"